Best Features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Simple Yet Effective On-Location Portrait Lighting Setup

I often get asked to do portrait shots during local charity events and getting a simple lighting setup is the key to having a successful event. If you just use on-camera flash you will get …

Mastering Your Flash 101 – Learning to Love eTTL/iTTL

For many people the thought of taking their flash off of eTTL/iTTL mode is as intimidating as BASE jumping off a bridge, this is because they haven’t even fully mastered these automatic settings yet. …

The Sunny 16 Rule in Photography

Although you may think that no two situations are alike, the fact is that there are quite a few constants that you can rely on to give you a good starting point. The sun is one of these things you can count on to be consistent. Of course there are things that affect the sun’s output like the time of day, haze, fog, and clouds, but on a bright sunny day the light output is very consistent and knowing the camera settings for this condition will give you a guideline to make adjustments. This is where the “sunny 16″ rule comes into play.

Building your own snoot

What is a snoot? Simply put, a snoot is a tubular structure that is used to limit the throw of a light source to create a narrow beam of light. While commercial snoots are actually pretty affordable, from $14 to about $20, so why would we want to make our own? Because we know what we want and because for $20 we can make a dozen or more experimental ones and end up with a handful that we could use in different situations. So guys. go break into the wife’s scrapbooking supplies and get ready to make your own customized flash snoot.

Lighting Basics – Using a single light source

Along with dissecting different photo shoots like we have done in the past, we are now beginning a new “Lighting Basics” series that will start with a single light source and work up through multiple …

Review: Multiblitz Profilux Monolight

Ok, let ‘s start this off with a few disclaimers here. First, hell is not freezing over, pigs are not flying, and the world is not coming to an end, although many of you may …

Getting Flash Exposure Fast

In this episode of our Friday Photo Tips I answer a common question about how to get flash exposure dialed in quickly when using manual strobes. This will work whether you are using manual speedlights …

Using a reflector

In this episode, Kerry Garrison (http://kerrygarrison.com) shows how to use a reflector to bounce sunlight onto a subject to help improve your natural light portraits

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Classic Portrait Lighting Styles Part I

As we continue our series on portrait lighting we now need to look at the different types of classic portrait lighting and see the effect it has on someone so we can decided when to use each type. By choosing the proper lighting for a particular person, we can help them to look their best by making them appear to be thinner or wider or to accent or minimize certain facial features.

Three Things to Know When Buying Your Lighting Essentials

Lighting can affect a shot, too much or less of it is a matter of delivering the perfect shot. Every photographer would stop relying on its camera’s built – in flash and start discovering and …

Color Correction with Gels

This week I show you how to match flash color with ambient color using colored gels on your flash. Kerry goes on to show you how to use the same technique to trick a scene into …

Podcast Flashback – Carlos Baez

This week we flash back to early 2009 with one of the most popular podcasts in the history of Camera Dojo.
In this show Kerry and David talk with Carlos Baez about the recent controversy over the …

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Introduction to White Balance

White balance is one of the more confusing aspects of digital photography and is one of the things that really baffles people when they go from simpler point and shoots to more advanced DSLR cameras …

Directional Lighting with On-Camera Flash

Buuuut Kerrrry..If you use your flash ON your camera (not your pop-up flash) you can’t get directional lighting, its going to look horrible. Well, yeah, and that’s why so many people don’t like to …

Lighting ratios for portraits

Shooting portraits using classic styles of lighting ratios is a dying art. Many new photographers are completely unfamiliar with how to do portrait lighting and so they don’t even try leaving the current trend of …

Review: Switronix TorchLED TL-50 Video Light

Videographers and photographers are always looking for great ways to add additional light when they need it and there is no doubt that LED lighting is the wave of the future. The problem is that …

Photography Basics: Beginners Guide to Aperture

As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.

Understanding Light Stops

One thing that seems to baffle a lot of new photographers is understanding the term “stop” as it pertains to a measurement of light. We see this word used over and over with regards to shutter speed, aperture, film speed, filters, lighting, and other ways that light is used. You may hear a phrase like “you should expose one side of face 1-2 stops under the lit side of the face and expose the background 1 stop under the main subject”. For many people that’s about like asking them to solve a complex calculus problem.